What a Surprise!! Al Jazeera "Outed".........

[ACPlayer]

If you listen to something long enough you believe it and I believe you have this channel on all the time.

I completely disagree with your view, but you are certainly entitled to it. Fox as a source of News or analysis is blatantly one-sided.

For the most part, in public discourse the art of the debate is lost and it is all about advocacy and spin.

[Mat Sklansky]

you talkin' to me?

[BruceZ]

But O'Reilly hosts the "no-spin" zone. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] I don't always agree with him, but he is usually right on, and I believe he is objective. Many people confuse opinion with spin, and they are not the same. Spin is making something into something that it is not, because the facts would not support a particular agenda.

[ACPlayer]

Remember the tooth fairy and santa claus. Just because he calls it the no-spin zone does not make it the no-spin zone.

It is really up to each of us to decide what is right and wrong and not get sop up the opinions of some paid hacks. The best way to do this, IMO, is to get as many different viewpoints and then create your own.

I have to think about exactly what is spin. But listen to Ari Fleischer, Bill Clinton, G Bush, Tom Daschle, they are all spinning the facts to advance there own agendas. The facts are shaded and presented in a way that is designed for just that purpose.

[BruceZ]

Hmmm, I actually thought I deleted that post to add some more stuff, but I guess it didn't work.

Most people don't think very well, and most media up until recently has been liberal spin, and so when a channel like FOX starts laying things on the line based on cold hard facts which support a position much more to the right than usual, many will interpret that as spin. You can tell the difference between the guests who present facts and perspectives, and those who are spinning.

I like the channel for the debates, and because we do get to hear from both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side may be, e.g. they had that EmClone alien guy on. He actually made more sense than most of the left wing guests [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img] If it were all one-sided, it would not be interesting to me. My learning style is confrontational. [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img] I like listening to debates even if I don't care about the subject being debated. I doubt I would otherwise have the time and interest to gather facts and do an analysis that would be any better than what the insiders from both sides who come to debate are presenting. I have more than enough analysis to do in my own field without worrying about things I can't do anything about anyway. Besides, I do get other opinions, I come here. It doesn't seem like I'm missing much sticking to FOX. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

O'Reilly isn't a hack, he's a very intelligent and educated man, and he knows how to think (most of the time). I agree with him on economic and defense issues, but he is too conservative for me on some social issues, hence my libertarian stance. Most people agree with my opinion, and that is why FOX is dominates the news media.

As for being entitled to my opinion, I like what Mike Caro says about that. He says no one is really "entitled" to hold any opinion, unless they have done some analysis or research to back it up.

This is off topic, but since you're here, and I don't want to open the other thread again, did you understand why we can't use the binomial distribution for the sequence of AAs problem, except as an approximation? We do not have independent Bernoulli trials, as I detail in that thread.

[ACPlayer]

Ya. I dont remember the exact sequence of notes -- but the binomial solution i proposed is not quite correct. The problem is in the definition of a trial. It is a very crude approximation.

I have been trying to figure out a closed form solution -- short of enumerating the possibilities and have failed. I even pulled out some old texts but no help.

[BruceZ]

I think it is very unlikely you will find an exact closed form solution, being familiar with the partial fraction expansion approximation methods normally used for such renewal problems. My inclusion-exclusion formula will converge to the solution with arbitrary accuracy with some tediousness in computing higher order terms, but this really isn't necessary for a satisfactory answer. My general conditional probability equation can be evaluated exactly in theory. I have another idea for a way to solve these problems that I am working on. I have solved it for the p=1/2 case in terms of Fibonacci, and I have not seen this published anywhere. I believe I can extend it to this type of problem. There may be an issue of factoring a large polynomial in the z-domain, but there are techniques for that. This is also what leads to partial fraction expansion. Otherwise, it should be possible to present a recursive solution.